Growing up in the South during the ’90s, Factory Records was always the music of older cousins and cooler friends. Don’t get me wrong, I have had hard musical crushes on acts like Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, and New Order, but it never seemed entirely mine either. It was the soundtrack for lives that I made guest appearances in, humming in the background as a bit of anglophile ennui.

This playlist is from Spotify user Coco Baker. (S)he isn’t a professional curator (as far as I know), and the playlist does have some factual slights (that Cabaret Voltaire track was released on Rough Trade and not Factory Records), but it’s still a pretty good overview of the scene. Too often, user generated playlist have no sense of rhythm. People will line up multiple tracks by the same artists, and there will be giant stylistic leaps from track to track, but this does seem to have a perspective and flow, so we’ll excuse the factual lapses.